Your article “Public libraries strapped for cash” (April 5) refers to the need for goodwill and political will to find money to prevent closures of public libraries. The Department of Education is blamed in the process.
The real threat to these libraries cannot be separated from a new “total onslaught” on the public sector that leaves more and more people without water, electricity, homes and health services. The source of this threat is the kind of privatisation eulogised in our economic policies, and we should be targeting the departments and ministers of finance and trade and industry.
As a member of the World Trade Organisation, our public libraries could face extinction under its General Agreement on Trade in Services.
Under its national treatment principle, powerful foreign companies entering the South African market offering library-like services cannot be discriminated against, nor prevented from trying to get government funding and tax support earmarked for our public libraries. The government will probably cut back or eliminate funding for public libraries, dooming them to closure. Access to information will then be affordable only to rich South Africans!
It is time that all librarians across the country and support groups, such as Friends of the Library, inform themselves of these wider economic issues, and join to make a public noise with the other elements of civil society that resist the reckless privatisation of information. Professor Archie L Dick, Unisa